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“... about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie Allan. I was working on a story about wild geese, which migrate from Greenland to Islay in their tens of thousands each year. They speckled the low-lying fields, but the dead boy was harder to trace. I sat for hours, sifting through Facebook accounts, until a ...”

“... to go and read Wittgenstein and George Eliot have been spending delicious secret hours enjoying Allan Quatermain’s phlegmatic accounts of people crushed to death, impaled, dismembered and beheaded. (Anyone imagining that ‘violence’ in fiction and films is somehow modern or post-modern should re-read some Victorian male-romances of the Haggard ...”

“... how ghoulish, but how necessary, to have the speech of family ghosts preserved, perpetually, on little wax cylinders. The phonographs, once manufacturing began, were mostly used as office dictating machines, upsetting stenographers. But the Edison factory knew about magic too, and they also made tiny prerecorded cylinders for insertion into talking ...”

“... of the outward flow. The Gauguin of 1889 still dreams of well-resolved figurines, so a haunting little clay effigy suggests, whereas by 1897 he is a performance artist putting out bad-boy bluster – a lewd, crude nameplate for his Tahiti bungalow – to wind up the colonial missionaries. These glimpses are from a strange sideways vantage. Henry ...”

“... deepens the mystery. This is an old-fashioned life and times that is full of times but has very little life, or at least little of the life of Jesse James. This is not entirely the author’s fault. There are abundant stories about James, but most of them are false. Stiles, unlike most writers trying to understand the ...”

“... of Sartre’s boyhood reading. She is prodigal with knowing looks, though reading the book did little to make me feel like a divinity. ‘Diane Arbus’s unsettling photographs of freaks and eccentrics were already being heralded in the art world before she killed herself in 1971’: so begins this strikingly predestinarian biography, enunciating in its ...”

“... uses metre in his prose, the crook. But still, America comes on and on, Land of the turkey, Edgar Allan Poe, Clam chowder, telegrams, and Audubon. I think I’ll take a tour there, just to know A New World now that this damned creaky old one Has got itself a gout in every toe And totters, more than marches, to the future, Afraid to break its grim dynastic ...”

“... of the veduta painters of the 17th and 18th centuries, with Vermeer’s View of Delft and The Little Street, or the views of Venice by Canaletto and the Guardis. The Smithsonian exhibition includes two canvases of Venice from 1980, View towards La Salute, Venice and Accademia, Venice, that are reminiscent of 18th-century Venetian painters even if they ...”

“... Allan Hobson is a leading Harvard neuroscientist who has figured prominently in the breakthroughs which have occurred over the past three decades in the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of sleep and dreams. Long known within the field for his provocative views on the philosophical implications of sleep research, Hobson in this much-awaited volume addresses himself for the first time to a general audience ...”

“... well be her last. She openly adored him, while he, an accomplished ladies’ man, longed for a little indifference. ‘Any woman who kept me in a state of anxiety could keep me permanently,’ he noted. Bowen realised she could keep him anyway. He had, she pointed out, ‘a will of india rubber’. The third point in this eternal triangle was not ...”

“... so poetic justice is seen to be done. Hollywood is a well-made novel with much wit of the ‘little did they know’ sort, which is perhaps easy enough in historical fiction. To the British Ambassador Washington in the 1880s was a minor capital, and ‘Buenos Aires was more desirable and more worldly.’ Then there are the Bolsheviks (‘At the ...”

“... anything, or is simply an overblown caprice, may depend on the susceptibilities of the reader. Allan Massie’s development as a novelist has been less ambitious, though with each novel he has become more solid, circumstantial and impressive. The Death of Men, his third, though it lacks the very individual mordant melancholy of The Last Peacock, is his ...”

“... from a young journalist at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia. This was Edgar Allan Poe, who had just weeks earlier published a short story, ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’, about an accidental voyage to the Moon in a hot air balloon. It was a knockabout yarn in the vein of Baron Munchhausen’s adventures but presented ...”

“... for experiment and innovation as well as political protest.Enwezor’s perceived bias towards little-known artists from distant corners of the globe seems to have earned him condescending and scurrilously ad hominem coverage from the New York press. At the same time, of course, Enwezor has included a number of European and US-based artists in Documenta ...”

“... can also stand for what is sometimes gained in translation. For instance, the French open up Edgar Allan Poe and out pops Baudelaire. Here, what has been lost in translation – Poe’s energetic vapidity – represents an enormous gain. Equally, the new-style doll will cover plagiarism, the original sin. For example, Baudelaire’s essay, ‘Edgar ...”